During spring of , I encountered the same problem— the disintegration of property—twice. Ten weeks later and over 6, miles from the classroom where I first encountered Grey, I crossed through the gates of Auschwitz. In my mind as I entered were the millions of people, all individuals with their own complex lives and interiorities, who suffered horrifically and then perished there.
The tallitot brought tears to my eyes, the baby clothes bile to my throat, perhaps because they looked hardly worse for the wear than the ones I regularly see on those I love. Almost a century later, time seemed to stand still at Auschwitz. This meticulous preservation is no coincidence. The problem is that nothing lasts forever. He made me understand that it was a matter of life and death not to say who I was. It was slated to return to the extermination camp by June 30, The International Auschwitz Council only extended the loan of the suitcase until January It's really a shame.
As the era is approaching when eye witnesses of the Holocaust Shoah will no longer be with us and when the sites of former Nazi concentration and extermination camps will be the most important and undeniable evidence of the tragedy of the Holocaust Shoah , the significance and integrity of these sites including all their movable and immovable remnants, will constitute a fundamental value regarding all the actions concerning these sites, and will become especially important for our civilization including, in particular, the education of future generations.
We, therefore, appeal for broad support of all conservation efforts in order to save those remnants as the testimony of the crimes committed there to the memory and warning for the generations to come … Yet again, refusing restitution finds justification in the need to preserve property to testify to the reality of the Holocaust once all survivors are deceased.
Holocaust remembrance, in other words, requires the property of the dead to stand in for victims and survivors themselves. As a result, these defenses often personify property. After all, when seeking to define inalienable human rights, Locke wrote of life, liberty, and property. Regardless of its origin, the way Auschwitz justifies its rightful ownership of the suitcase reveals that much more is at stake in the property dispute than merely the correct legal allocation of a commodity.
